What Counts as the Environment in Epigenetics? Knowledge and Ignorance in the Entrepreneurial University (2022)
Epigenetics research is well-known for its attention to the ‘environment,’ as it explores how what surrounds the genes impacts gene regulation. In addition, epigenetics has commonly been described as the new socio-biology capable of capturing how the broadly defined social environment, structured by social inequalities, shapes biology. Yet, this vision is not realised in the context of the entrepreneurial university. In the two laboratories where ethnographic fieldwork was conducted, scientists focus their research on narrow articulations of the notion of environment, around individual ‘lifestyle’ or micro-environments within which tumours develop. While the entrepreneurial university is characterised by multiple authoritative agencies evaluating and legitimising research, the narrowing of research priorities in epigenetics can be explained by the overlap of multiple scales of environment in which such authoritative agencies exercise authority: a disciplinary environment with peer-reviewed journals, an institutional environment with research managers, a market environment with funding bodies and commercial firms. In a general context of precarity, these environmental scales successively shape the content of research, by imposing filters on researchers’ practices, while implementing incentives encouraging certain forms of research. In particular, it favours a certain type of epigenetics research that is individualised and clinically centred, while leaving unexplored the social determinants of health and its biological corollary. This article adds to existing scholarship by, first, operationalising the broad concept of entrepreneurial university through the analysis of authoritative agencies and their role on research practices, and second, by providing empirical evidence of the interplay between research content and research environment.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Andrea Boggio;
Andrea Ballabeni;
David Hemenway;
(March 2016)
Basic Research and Knowledge Production Modes: A View from the Harvard Medical School
(/isis/citation/CBB479468835/)
Book
Steven Connor;
(2019)
The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing
(/isis/citation/CBB416224457/)
Article
Sonja van Wichelen;
(2022)
Identity in Postgenomic Times: Epigenetic Knowledge and the Pursuit of Biological Origins
(/isis/citation/CBB901091045/)
Article
Charles Dupras;
Katie Michelle Saulnier;
Yann Joly;
(October 2019)
Epigenetics, ethics, law and society: A multidisciplinary review of descriptive, instrumental, dialectical and reflexive analyses
(/isis/citation/CBB595581322/)
Chapter
Ruse, Michael;
(2005)
Evolutionary Biology and the Question of Trust
(/isis/citation/CBB000651361/)
Article
Michel Pretalli;
(2019)
Hannibal versus Phormio: Theory and Practice in Italian Military Literature at the End of the Renaissance
(/isis/citation/CBB555691679/)
Article
Laurent Loison;
(2022)
The environment: An ambiguous concept in Waddington's biology
(/isis/citation/CBB008706802/)
Article
Clémence Pinel;
(March 2021)
Renting Valuable Assets: Knowledge and Value Production in Academic Science
(/isis/citation/CBB574556496/)
Article
Christina Brandt;
Helmut Maier;
Helmut Pulte;
(2019)
Einleitung (Introduction to Special Section on Knowledge and Environment)
(/isis/citation/CBB411993127/)
Article
Shana Lee Hirsch;
David Ribes;
Sarah Inman;
(2022)
Sedimentary legacy and the disturbing recurrence of the human in long-term ecological research
(/isis/citation/CBB100002745/)
Article
Anna Guagnini;
(2017)
Ivory towers? The commercial activity of British professors of engineering and physics, 1880–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB349840744/)
Article
Joris Mercelis;
Gabriel Galvez-Behar;
Anna Guagnini;
(2017)
Introduction: Commercializing science: nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic scientists as consultants, patentees, and entrepreneurs
(/isis/citation/CBB198451132/)
Article
Lawrence M. Principe;
(2021)
The Changing Visions of Chymistry at Seventeenth-Century Jena: The Two Brendels, Rolfinck, Wedel, and Others
(/isis/citation/CBB775925326/)
Article
Baldini, Nicola;
Fini, Riccardo;
Grimaldi, Rosa;
Sobrero, Maurizio;
(2014)
Organisational Change and the Institutionalisation of University Patenting Activity in Italy
(/isis/citation/CBB001420874/)
Article
Bruce T. Moran;
(2021)
Court Authority and the University: Networks, Recipes, and Things-in-the-Making vs. the Abstractions of Made Things
(/isis/citation/CBB242194040/)
Article
Joris Mercelis;
(2017)
Commercializing academic knowledge and reputation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: photography and beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB100324701/)
Article
Phil Weilerstein;
Tina Seelig;
Sheri Sheppard;
Thomas H. Byers;
(Summer 2013)
Entrepreneurship: Its Role in Engineering Education
(/isis/citation/CBB650292518/)
Article
Wolfgang König;
(2017)
Engineering professors as entrepreneurs: the case of Franz Reuleaux (1829–1905) and Alois Riedler (1850–1936)
(/isis/citation/CBB487217376/)
Book
Anna Marie Roos;
Gideon Manning;
(2023)
Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar: Essays in Honor of Mordechai Feingold
(/isis/citation/CBB202998055/)
Article
Lam, Alice;
(2010)
From “Ivory Tower Traditionalists” to “Entrepreneurial Scientists”? Academic Scientists in Fuzzy University-Industry Boundaries
(/isis/citation/CBB000953636/)
Be the first to comment!